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It's Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend as I'm writing this, and I couldn't be happier we have no real plans and nowhere to be. We gathered with family on Friday night for the much anticipated and delicious first burgs and dogs of the summer, and the rest of the weekend will consist of minor projects around the house and waiting for the Phillies games to start. I'm not going to consider doing anything mildly productive until Tuesday morning.
Our youngest son Ben stays busy too and he was thrilled recently to be asked to help out teaching a beginner's tennis class. He's got a good group of friends, and it's refreshing to hear him ask if he can go bike riding with them or just hang out with them in lieu of interacting with them via iPad. His imagination continues to run wild, and he's still taking his story writing to new levels on his very own private (except to a chosen few of us) blog.
I've got a box of 141 cards from our 1969 Topps set sitting on the project table next to me, ready to be written about, scanned and slid into their pockets in my set binder. This is still a relaxing and enjoyable pastime for me, and I wish I had had this outlet when I was collecting sets in the 1980s or 1990s. I've spent way more time with this set (and the 1965 Topps set) than I did when my Dad and I were hand-collating Topps sets released between 1970 and 1976. I'm not breaking any new ground here, and readership hovers between very light to light, but I'm having fun. I'm already looking forward to working on similar blogs for when I officially start collecting the 1955 Bowman and 1959 Topps sets. At the pace I'm on now, one or both of those blogs should debut in 2025 or early 2026. I say "at the pace I'm on now," as similar to last summer, time available to write about 55-year-old baseball cards could dwindle as we happily embrace our summer schedules.
Building the Set / Card #302
December 3, 2023 from The Philly Show (Uncle Dick's Cards)
Doug and I returned to The Philly Show in early December, once again held inside the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pennsylvania. eBay has taken over sponsorship of the show, with the quaint, bubble-lettered Philly Show logo that had been in place since the 1980s replaced with a more modern logo, keeping with the times. I wrote about the show in a post over at The Phillies Room.
December 3, 2023 from The Philly Show (Uncle Dick's Cards)
Doug and I returned to The Philly Show in early December, once again held inside the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pennsylvania. eBay has taken over sponsorship of the show, with the quaint, bubble-lettered Philly Show logo that had been in place since the 1980s replaced with a more modern logo, keeping with the times. I wrote about the show in a post over at The Phillies Room.
Similar to my strategy from March, I wanted to focus on accumulating commons and having found success with Uncle Dick's Cards before, I didn't mess around and headed right for the neon green binders. I pulled 145 cards from the binder containing cards 301 to the end of the set, stopping when I reached 500. This card was the tenth of 145 cards purchased for our set, and after the dealer discount due to my bulk purchase, it cost me a little under $3.50.
This would surprisingly be the final season for Dodgers' ace Don Drysdale (#400), as a torn rotator cuff ended his 1969 season early and led to his retirement. After the 1st Series checklist (#57) blew my theory that Topps chose which player should cameo on the checklist card based on the biggest star appearing within that checklist card, I'm starting to think Denny McLain (#150) was an anomaly.
Drysdale is arguably the biggest star on this checklist card, although a case could be made for Harmon Killebrew (#375), Orlando Cepeda (#385), Al Kaline (#410) or any of the first ten All-Star cards.
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